Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are developmental disorders which are thought primarily to affect social functioning. However, there is now a growing body of evidence that unusual sensory processing is at least a concomitant and possibly the cause of many of the behavioural signs and symptoms of ASD. A comprehensive and critical review of the phenomenological, empirical, neuroscientific and theoretical literature pertaining to visual processing in ASD is presented, along with a brief justification of a new theory which may help to explain some of the data, and link it with other current hypotheses about the genetic and neural aetiologies of this enigmatic condition.

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. (2015) The sensory experiences of adults with autism spectrum disorder: a qualitative analysis. Perception, 44(5), pp. 569-586. Copyright © 2015 PionA copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge Content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder

Human speech conveys many forms of information, but for some exceptional individuals (synaesthetes), listening to speech sounds can automatically induce visual percepts such as colours. In this experiment, grapheme–colour synaesthetes and controls were asked to assign colours, or shades of grey, to different vowel sounds. We then investigated whether the acoustic content of these vowel sounds influenced participants' colour and grey-shade choices. We found that both colour and grey-shade associations varied systematically with vowel changes. The colour effect was significant for both participant groups, but significantly stronger and more consistent for synaesthetes. Because not all vowel sounds that we used are “translatable” into graphemes, we conclude that acoustic–phonetic influences co-exist with established graphemic influences in the cross-modal correspondences of both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes.

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